Video of the Week: Goldray’s Rising

Sometimes you really can judge a book from its cover – in this case, an advertisement on the back cover of the latest issue of Shindig! music zine (the one with Jimi on the front cover) caught my eye. The ad is for the album Rising by British psych-rockers Goldray, a fairly new band formed by industry veteran Kenwyn House, guitarist for 1990s-era British band Reef, which enjoyed quite a few hits in the U.K. and developed somewhat of a cult following stateside. The colorful ad quoted Prog Magazine as saying that Goldray’s music was “a blend of Zeppelin and Kate Bush.”

My curiosity piqued, I tracked down this video for the title track of Goldray’s debut LP and was gleefully surprised. “Rising,” the song, pushes all of our favorite buttons here at That Devil Music world HQ – blues, psychedelia, guitar-driven hard rock, ethereal female vox, punchy percussion – the song an amalgam of all of the above and much, much more. Lead singer Leah Rasmussen does, indeed, sound a bit like Bush during her loftiest moments, but she’s just as likely to test her vocal chords like Grace Slick, imbuing the lyrics with muscular emotion. House is a badass guitarist who I’m surprised I haven’t heard of before, his unhinged lysergic fretwork on the song the freshest thing these tired ears have heard since King Gizzard’s “microtones.”

I ordered the band’s CD this afternoon and if this is your cuppa heady psych-rock brew, you should get one, too...

Buy the CD from Amazon.com: Goldray's Rising